Ugh. Had to wipe laptop. Curious now...

I was using Sandboxie and Shadow Defender pretty merrily but wanted to see how a real-time AV would affect performance and boost security.
RSS Pro seemed like a logical choice.
I installed on a clean and freshly defragged system and used System Restore, Virtual System and the real-time AV component.
I soon noticed that a whooole lump of fragmented files dumped on my hard drive.
I've since uninstalled RSS and reinstalled Windows as no amount of defragging was clearing up the files.
My question is this:

Was this mass of files a direct result of the RSS virtualisation process? In which case it would appear to use more space than Shadow Defender or Deep Freeze combined many times over.

 

Can you describe what you are reporting in greater detail? What do you mean by:

Don't confuse used space with reserved space. RSS/RVS use dynamic caching that has a cap (percentage of free space available) that can be adjusted per your preferences.

Windows is not able to properly recognize the difference between used and reserved so defaults to automatically saying this space is used when it actually isn't actually used.

Mike

 

My apologies for the lack of detail. I defragged prior to install with Windows defragger. Checking the disk after setting up Virtual Mode revealed a large clump of red/fragmented files in what was previously free space. The only thing I could think of at the time was that this was a copy of my drive and files-the clump of red looked like a mirror image. I'd have taken a screenshot if I knew how

So you're suggesting that these files may not in fact be files at all? More like potential or hypothetical space? It was certainly alarming. I assumed that SD and DF used similar methods which is why I found it odd that they made very little impact on the disk image.

 

DF and SD use static caching which means that you define the size and parameters of the cache and that area is set aside while remaining always the same size. RSS/RVS on the other hand use dynamic caching which is more fluid, but does not require contiguous disk space to create and maintain. It also uses RAM before disk for performance.

The dynamic nature of the cache however requires that space be "reserved" which only means that the space might be used if needed to track changes that are either all dropped at restart (default) or some of it is saved to the real disk per user preference (ref: File Manager overrides general dropping for defined list items and saves tracked changes to the real disk at the interval(s) specified).

Not requiring that you pre-define the cache is why Windows will see it as a big empty file which it thinks is fragmented. the reality is that it is simply a "border" with free space inside, but Windows is not capable of making that differentiation so sees all the bordered space as fragmented when it really isn't.

Mike

 

That was a more thorough and well explained answer than I probably deserved Thanks Mike.

In hindsight I shouldn't have mentioned the impact RSS had on my system in the first post. That wasn't particularly relevant and may have appeared overly critical I've removed it.

Thanks again for your help with the Virtual System question Mike.